Memory boom: Micron's quarterly revenue nearly quintuples
Micron's revenue reached USD 54.2 billion in the fourth quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, almost five times the level of the same quarter last year. Rising memory prices pushed the gross margin to 87%, and the company expects supply to become even tighter in 2027 and 2028.
Revenue rose 31% from the previous quarter and 379% YoY, according to Micron's quarterly report and earnings presentation. Net income amounted to USD 37.7 billion, or USD 38.4 billion on a non-GAAP basis. For the full fiscal year, revenue reached USD 133.2 billion, up from USD 37.4 billion, while DRAM revenue alone exceeded USD 100 billion.
The QoQ increase was driven primarily by prices rather than volumes. DRAM revenue rose 27% to USD 39.8 billion, with average selling prices up in the high-teens percentage range and bit shipments up only in the mid-single digits. NAND revenue grew 42% to USD 14.1 billion, as prices rose by around 30% and bit shipments by around 10%.
Data centres account for most of the growth. Revenue in the Cloud Memory business unit rose to USD 16.3 billion, from USD 4.5 billion a year earlier, and Core Data Center to USD 18.0 billion, from USD 1.6 billion. Together, the two units account for about 65% of the YoY revenue increase.
Data centre SSD revenue reached nearly USD 10 billion, more than ten times that of a year earlier, and made up over two-thirds of Micron's total NAND revenue. Micron says it has agreed on the vast majority of its HBM supply for calendar 2027, with significant price increases YoY.
Micron expects industry DRAM bit shipments to grow in the low-20s percentage range in both 2027 and 2028, with the market remaining supply-constrained.
According to Sanjay Mehrotra, Chairman and CEO of Micron, a structural gap between the growth rates of DRAM supply and demand is keeping supply tight, and new cleanroom space is needed alongside node transitions to help close it.
"Even with additional industry DRAM cleanroom space plans, with robust demand trends including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance," Mehrotra said in his prepared remarks for the earnings call.
To date, the company has signed 26 multi-year take-or-pay agreements with customers, which it estimates will account for more than 35% of its revenue through 2030. Customers' financial commitments under the agreements have increased to USD 32 billion, most of them in the form of cash deposits.
Micron also says that it plans to raise its capital expenditure for fiscal 2027 compared with earlier plans, mainly to bring new cleanroom space online from late 2028.
New capacity is still some way off. Micron's ID1 fab in Idaho is set to start wafer output in mid-2027 and its ID2 fab in late 2028. Both the DRAM expansion in Japan and a new NAND facility in Singapore are expected to begin output in the second half of 2028, while the first New York fab is not expected to produce wafers until 2030.
For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Micron expects revenue of USD 61.5 billion, plus or minus USD 1.5 billion, and a gross margin of around 86%.
